Terror in Brussels

Survivors and a security officer shortly after the terrorist attack at the airport in Brussels.

PHOTOGRAPH BY GEERT VANDEN WIJNGAERT / AP

Shortly after eight o’clock this morning, hundreds of travellers started running down a ramp outside Brussels Airport, wheeled baggage trailing behind them. Some glanced back in disbelief toward a wall of shattered glass, where smoke was seeping out. Two suicide bombers had just detonated inside the departures hall.

Inside, amid pools of blood and rubble, there were detached limbs scattered on the floor. The force of the explosions had caused ceiling panels to come off; they covered the dead and filled the hall with dust. Survivors screamed. Many were soaked in blood—some of it their own, some belonging to those around them. A few paused to photograph and videotape the devastation. A Kalashnikov lay on the ground, near where one of the bombs had exploded. Beyond the security checkpoint, passengers emptied the terminals and took refuge on the tarmac, wrapping themselves in airline blankets to ward off the cold.

Less than an hour later, near the headquarters of the European Commission, there was an explosion inside a metro car as it trundled between the stops at Maelbeek and Schuman. The train halted inside the tunnel. Commuters wrenched open the doors and, fearing the attack may have only begun, those who hadn’t been killed or severely wounded started running on the tracks. During the hours that followed, soldiers wearing combat fatigues stood guard as medical units treated the wounded on the grimy sidewalk lining Rue de la Loi. Emergency personnel pushed gurneys down the middle of the highway, which had been closed to traffic. Belgian officials estimate that at least thirty-four people have been killed and more than two hundred have been wounded.

For the second time in four months, terrorism has shut down the Belgian capital. Last November, as the investigation into the Paris attacks shifted to Brussels, public transit was suspended and soldiers were deployed to the streets because of the threat of a “serious and imminent” assault on the public. Today all flights and international trains have been diverted from Brussels, and the Army has sent two hundred and twenty-five troops to patrol the city. The Belgian government urged locals to contact loved ones through landlines, social media, and texting, because the cell-phone networks were overwhelmed. “What we feared has happened,” the Prime Minister, Charles Michel, announced. “We were hit by blind attacks.” The Islamic State immediately claimed responsibility.

Though recent instances of terrorism in Europe are often claimed by ISIS, Belgium’s jihadi networks predate the Syrian war; after it began, they helped fuel the rise of its most extreme groups. In March, 2010, an aspiring militant preacher named Fouad Belkacem travelled to London to seek advice from Anjem Choudary, the spokesman for a radical group called al-Muhajiroun, whose members have been involved in several violent attacks, including the murder of Lee Rigby, a British soldier, on the streets of London. The next month, Belkacem launched Sharia4Belgium and began recruiting young people to learn the principles of jihad. His followers underwent a rigorous ideological training program, with daily lectures and regular consultations, by video with a militant preacher in Lebanon. At the end of the semester, they took a final examination, which asked rudimentary questions about Islam and politics. They also watched battlefield footage from wars involving Muslims in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and came to think of the fighters as heroes defending their religion against corrupt Crusaders. In early 2012, a few of them were detained in Yemen under suspicion of trying to join Al Qaeda. Later that year, the first Sharia4Belgium member travelled to Syria. Dozens followed.

The Sharia4Belgium headquarters was in Antwerp, but several of its members lived in Brussels and formed connections with other disaffected youth there. Belkacem used to preach in the public squares in both cities, as well as in towns on the train line between them. Last year, as I wrote for the magazine, a judge declared Sharia4Belgium a terrorist organization, and forty-six of its members were convicted of being affiliated. Most were still in Syria. Some were already dead. When Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who eventually led at least nine other killers in November’s attacks on Paris, travelled to Syria, he joined a group of Belgian, Dutch, and French fighters in an ISIS brigade northwest of Aleppo. Many of his comrades were former members of Sharia4Belgium.

Today, of the five or six thousand Europeans who have travelled to fight in Syria and Iraq, at least a thousand have returned. Most face no charges; for a successful prosecution, their governments must prove that they joined ISIS, Al Qaeda, or another terrorist group. Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, a former executive director of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, told me last year that the bar for what qualifies as “intelligence” for the security services is, “for good reason, lower than the bar you have to pass when you prosecute in a court of law.” Social-media postings—even those claiming allegiance to terrorist groups—are rarely sufficient.

Many fighters leave the battlefield disenchanted by what they have seen. But those intent on carrying out attacks increasingly demonstrate sophisticated training. As the Times reported, the team that attacked Paris showed unusual discipline; even after four months of investigation, European police have found no traces of its communications.

Assessing the motivations and psychological well-being of returnees is costly and difficult. Meanwhile, security services are poorly equipped to detect terror suspects who travel across Europe’s open borders, some of whom embed themselves within the refugee flow. Last year, a retired Belgian counter-terrorism official told me that it takes a twenty-person surveillance team to comprehensively monitor one suspect—and that’s when the target’s location is already known.

Today, politicians across Europe expressed condolences for the victims in Brussels while announcing increased security measures in their own countries. France deployed sixteen hundred police officers to transportation hubs and border areas. But these measures are unlikely to reassure a rattled public. Belgium has been on high alert for the past four months, and the police have conducted hundreds of counter-terrorism raids in troubled neighborhoods, culminating in the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, the final major suspect in the Paris attacks. The increasingly militarized campaign to root out extremism will be little consolation to the victims’ families.